The Elicitive Theory

: Building local conflict transformation models at a PBI workshop in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Photo: PBI.

The Indonesia Project's Peace Education workshops focuses on the 'elicitive method' that is adapted from the work of Peace Building theorist John Paul Lederach, whereby participants are the main resources in creating their model of conflict transformation that matches their own local context. In addition, culture is perceived as the basis of conflict transformation so that the facilitator's role is simply to act as a catalyst for the drawing out and emphasizing the local wisdom.

Practice

In order to ensure that the workshops are in keeping with the theory above and PBI's goals, the Peace Education Workshop Team:

Conducts a thorough needs assessment well in advance of the workshop.
Partners with local facilitators and cooperates with these facilitators on all aspects of the needs assessment, curriculum development, preparation and follow up for the workshop.
Deploys a facilitation team that is able to incorporate local knowledge into the workshop curriculum and is able to adapt the workshop to meet the changing needs of the participants.
Pro-actively engages the participants in activities that give them an opportunity to practice the skills and strategies being developed.
Provides follow up Training of Trainers in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the programme.

Results

The participants leave the workshops with an expanded toolbox for their peace-building activities. The impact of the peace education workshops cannot be measured merely from the acquisition of "hard skills", such as nonviolent communication and mediation skills, but need to take into account the significant enhancement of "soft skills", such as an understanding and tolerance between the participants.

PBI hopes that workshop participants will serve as agents for change in their respective communities throughout Indonesia.

Concrete long-term outcomes from these Peace Building trainings are dependant on many other factors, but there have been several initiatives which participants attribute to the PBI workshops.

Example One: PBI has worked with local organisations in Flores for several years, holding 5 Conflict Transformation workshops and 1 Training-of-Trainers. Since then, several participants have designed and facilitated their own Peace Building workshops. Other participants from the Flores CT workshops have told PBI about how they have used the skills they developed in PBI workshops to reduce and resolve conflicts in their communities. For PBI, this is the best example of our work being successful - when we no longer are needed to do it!

Example Two: Following the Sulawesi Training of Trainers in February 2005, participants created a Sulawesi Peace Network, using an online e-group to discuss their work, share strategies and to plan activities together. Where previously there was little or no contact between these peace building groups, who come from differing religious and ethnic backgrounds, they are now sharing information and building bridges between communities.